Kent State and Jackson State: Looking Back/Leaning Forward

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

May 4, 2012

Again and again we learn that war and empire abroad will find a way home.

On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announced the US invasion of Cambodia, a sovereign nationthe US had been secretly bombing for several months. It was a saturation campaign involving120 strikes a day by B-52s carrying up to 60,000 pounds of bombs each. But in the commondoublespeak of war, the president claimed: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia… once enemyforces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we willwithdraw…”

Nixon’s aggression against Cambodia was accompanied by a verbal assault on those inside theUS opposing the war: “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home,” he intoned. Thenext day, Nixon went to the Pentagon to clarify the point: “you see these bums…blowing up thecampuses…burning up the books, I mean storming around about this issue…you name it, get ridof the war, there’ll be another one.”

On the rolling spring lawns of Kent State in the American heartland, students continued topress against an illegal, immoral war of occupation. The first entering classes of Black studentsformed themselves into what was to become a growing wave of Black Student Unions, evenat Kent State. Returning veterans were throwing their medals back at the war-mongers, andthemselves becoming students.

Two days after the official invasion of Cambodia, 900 national guardsmen amassed on the KentState campus. M-1 rifles were raised, and within 13 seconds, 61 shots were fired on unarmedstudents—four were dead, nine wounded. It was, the official Presidential Commission onCampus Unrest later found, “a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth.”

The outright murder of (white) college students engaged in peaceful protest at Kent StateUniversity, and the lesser-recognized but equally tragic murder of (Black) unarmed collegestudents at Jackson State University that same week, were shocking although forewarned.Richard Nixon and the political class had denounced students as thugs and subversives for theirresistance to the pervasive US war crimes in Viet Nam, to the secret wars against Laos andCambodia, to the flagrant arming and supporting of tyrants throughout Latin America, and to thelavish funding of apartheid and colonialism in Africa. Invasion, lawlessness, military occupation

and counter-insurgency, displacement, and systematic violence visited on others necessarilycreated its domestic corollary: a militarized national security state promoting heightened crueltyand callousness at home, the shredding of Constitutional liberty and rights, and the unleashingof armed violence on its own citizens. The ten year war against Viet Nam and the murderous(secret) assault on the Black Freedom Movement were blood cousins, Kent and Jackson State itsoffspring.

Today the permanent wars carried out by the US military and its NATO spawn bring hometheir own violence and tragedy. Witness the mass killings at Fort Hood, astronomical suiciderates for returning veterans, widespread rape and assault on women in the military by theirfellow soldiers, attempted assassinations of politicians, and the galloping arms race amongordinary citizens and residents who are increasingly arming up and carrying concealedweapons to work and play. Add to that the quiet violence of a 20%, child poverty rate inthe richest nation in history, a prison gulag of mass incarceration sweeping up 2 ½ millionpeople, harsh economic “austerity” resulting in severe slashing and degradation of education,health care, housing, public transportation and jobs at home—all of it hitting people of colordisproportionally. Empire and constant military wars not only squander the public wealth anddirectly destroy the lives of millions, they inevitably bring about a Panopticon-like nationalsecurity state and a militarized domestic life at home.

At Kent State, students met with state violence and terror previously directed almost exclusivelyat the Black and Latino Freedom Movements. In response, 80% of US colleges and universitiescalled for some form of strike. Four million students were involved in protests, willing to facebeing beaten, gassed, or even shot. The National Guard was called out at 21 colleges anduniversities, five hundred campuses cancelled classes, and 51 did not re-open until the fall. InWashington, D.C., 130,000 students mobilized against war and repression.

It was all merely prelude: greater repression and disintegration at home will accompany thelong wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bahrain and Pakistan; Occupy, Madison, Trayvon andinevitable resistance will surely follow.